Choices
by EstelRaca
Summary: Den-O. SPOILERS for near end-of-series things. Yuuto needs more cards, but Sakurai is running out of memories to offer. One-shot, character study.


**Disclaimer:** I don't own them, though I love the writers who created them and the actors who gave them such vibrant life.

**AN:** This is one of my first attempts at a Kamen Rider fic. I've been watching a lot of the Heisei series with friends, though so far my favorites by far and away are Kuuga and Den-O. There will likely be more to come in those two 'verses if people like this. Enjoy!

_Choices_

He needs more cards.

He doesn't tell me. He never tells me much about how his battles are going. "I'm fine." "No problem." "Taken care of." Even when he's bruised and limping and Deneb's fluttering around him like a terrified moth, all he offers me is a sullen glare and muttered reassurances.

I think, sometimes, looking into those familiar brown eyes, that he hates me. It's a puzzling thought—a depressing thought. I can't remember hating anyone, even when I was his age… was him, I suppose I should say, but there's a paradox tangled in there. Even Kai doesn't stir hate in me, and I _should_ hate him.

But I've been fighting him too long, seen too much of what he is, and found far too many similarities between him and I. The half-mad Imajin singularity point who never should have existed, fighting for a dystopian future that's all he can hope for… I _know_ him, know all of the Imajin far too well through Deneb. I will fight them with all I am, because I think my future is more precious and more right, but I can't hate them.

Yuuto hates them. With an intensity and fierceness that scares me, because I don't recognize myself in it. It's some consolation that he loves with the same intensity with which he hates, if not the same openness. Even more consolation that he has chosen the same things as me to love. Airi. Ryoutarou. Deneb.

Still… I look in the living mirror that he is, and each time I see a little less of myself. I should have expected it, I suppose. I was a normal child, in a normal family, my worst problem finding a way to balance my pride with my true personality.

Him I've made a soldier, a lonely foot soldier, following my orders without knowing the full shape of the situation or the plan. And though I'm doing it for all the right reasons, though he's agreed to it, I can see it twisting him—twisting me—into something else.

And now he needs more cards. And I'm running out of memories to offer.

A part of me wants to blame him. He is proud, ridiculously proud, and despite my warnings he's used cards in ways he shouldn't. Ways he didn't need to—to show off to Ryoutarou at first, then to prove his strength to the young Imajin in Ryou. He almost lost one by flinging it into the river, though I've seen enough of the shape of that incident in Deneb's mind for pity and sorrow to far outweigh anger.

What did I expect from a seventeen year old boy? That he would accept everything I told him with perfect equilibrium? That he would understand what was being asked of him? That his mind would stay perfectly stable if I shoved a train full of paradox and an Imajin I had led him to fear into his head? That his soul would remain untainted when I placed the responsibility for saving the human race and damning another onto his shoulders?

Yes. I expected him to be _me_, but from the beginning he wasn't, and I fear I've realized it too late to fix all the damage that's been done already.

I could try to undo it. He needs more cards, and as much as he might hate me, I know he'll use every one I give him. But all I have left to give is one of our existences.

His or mine.

The boy who shouldn't ever have existed, the me who isn't me… or the one who created him.

Either way could work. We're both barely here anymore, vestiges of people clinging to the fixed points that Zeronos creates. Now that Ryoutarou knows us both as Zeronos, it should be easy enough for him to reform time with only one of us. With me taking my younger version's place in the time-stream, him disappearing, a nightmare that never happened.

'Should' isn't always guaranteed around Ryoutarou, though. He shouldn't have remembered me from the first time I used the cards, but he does, with a dogged determination that I recognize and love. I wouldn't remember the younger version of me, but he might, bits and pieces of a life that never happened, and the thought of putting him through that kind of agony chills me.

Simply the thought of erasing the boy who has sacrificed so much for a life that both is and isn't his own chills me, and I hesitate. Waiting for something, anything to tell me what I should do.

"Sakurai?"

I smile, turning to face Deneb, because as crazy as it is the Imajin is one of the things I love most in this world. And I am killing him, as surely as I am killing myself and the boy who isn't quite me anymore.

"What's wrong, Sakurai-san?" He moves toward me, deferential and worried, looking so at home in Zero-liner. "Yuuto hasn't caused any trouble. I'm sure of it."

"I know." The boy isn't responsible for the trouble we're in. This is a battle between Kai and Airi and I, and Yuuto is as much a victim as Ryoutarou and Deneb and the rest of the Imajin.

A victim who's stolen my given name in the thoughts of those I love. Who's become a brother to the boy I was almost a father to, a son to the Imajin I was brother to, a rival for the affections of the woman I love. But a victim all the same.

There really isn't any question about what I should do. There never should have been, but it terrifies me, this final sacrifice, more than anything I have done before.

"Here." I give the card to Deneb, and I can see understanding dawning as he studies it. "Give it to Yuuto when he needs it most. And tell him not to worry. If he uses that, he won't just disappear one day. He'll make his own time-line, however he wishes."

"Sakurai… Yuuto…" Deneb holds the card reverently, staring at me with eyes that don't know how to cry but would if they could. "Thank you."

I hug him, because I'm terrified and because he's one of the few people left in the universe that I can embrace. And even though it hurts that he doesn't argue with me, doesn't try to talk me out of this plan, I can't blame him for that. What I'm doing is the right thing, and there is as much sorrow as relief in his mind as he embraces me in return.

Better suicide than fratricide, any day.


End file.
